


For Whom the Bell Tolls

by deathishauntedbyhumans



Series: Radiation Funland [5]
Category: GURPS, Original Work
Genre: Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Bells, Blood and Gore, Brief description of violence, Clowns, Dark Past, Fear, Gen, Guns, It's only one paragraph but it IS there, M/M, Original Character(s), POV Third Person, Panic, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, alarms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 21:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14985650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathishauntedbyhumans/pseuds/deathishauntedbyhumans
Summary: Dez can't stop living in the past, but having Nick around helps.





	For Whom the Bell Tolls

Dez awakens to an angry shout. He startles his way back into awareness and finds himself curled up against Nick’s chest, with the other man’s arms draped loosely around him and keeping him in place. He hears the voice again from outside of their room, hissed and angry, and forces himself to stumble up and out of Nick’s warm embrace. He nearly falls as he makes his way to the door, anxiety clawing at him as he throws it open and comes face-to-face with the lady whose home they’d stayed in for the night. Before he can say anything to her, a rifle is pointed at his chest, and he goes very, very still. 

Ode slowly creeps forward, and as Anaïs and Dez both watch, the clown takes ahold of the barrel of the rifle and points it back at themself, instead. 

Anaïs growls angrily under her breath and pushes past Ode, who does nothing to stop her and simply looks on in confusion. The woman, still dressed in her nightgown with her rifle in her hands, grabs ahold of a bell and begins to ring it.

There’s obviously something wrong, but there isn’t anything any of them can do just standing around. Dez blinks as Nick appears behind him, shaking his head at the gruff question asked of him and looking to Ode for an answer. 

Missing children. As if that’s what they need, on top of everything else they already have to deal with. 

The bell is still ringing down the hall. Nick shoulders his way past Dez, and Dez makes to follow. 

He manages two steps before the bell really sinks in. It’s loud and grating, and it blocks everything else out, and suddenly, he isn’t worried about the missing children anymore because he can’t even remember that they exist. The bell stops him, and he freezes where he stands in the hall, breath coming short as his mind plays tricks on him. 

The bell… the bell.

The sound of the bell, loud and grating, morphs into the sound of an alarm, loud and grating, and he can see lights flashing and he can hear people rushing about outside of his cell and he can’t breathe because he doesn’t know what’s happening he doesn’t know he doesn’t know—

Except. 

He  _ does  _ know what’s happening, and the realisation of the truth is worse than not understanding. 

The alarm is loud and grating, and then, suddenly, the sound stops. 

The lights continue to flash, though, and Dez can see them, can see the person that they’re dragging past his cell. 

Their wings glisten under the lights, the red of the alert making the blood shimmer. It’s almost entrancing, until Dez realises that that’s  _ blood _ , it’s  _ blood _ , and oh god oh christ they’re dragging them by the wings and someone is pulling their hair and oh they’re yelling and he can’t hear anything else and all he can see is the cell the bars of the cell the lights the—

The end of the hallway. Not the hallway with the winged person, but the hallway… In Anaïs’ house. It’s morning, and there’s light shining through, and the bleary murmur of too many sleepy children in one place… He can hear that. He can hear that, and he can see… 

Nick. That’s Nick, and Nick is… Nick is safe. 

He remembers, just for a second, warmth instead of fear. He remembers sleeping dreamlessly, curled up against another warm body, curled up against  _ Nick.  _ He remembers feeling  _ safe _ , feeling safe in Nick’s arms, being held by-- 

_ Nick,  _ who’s touching his shoulder  _ now _ and asking if he’s alright. 

He isn’t, but he will be. He leans into Nick’s fleeting touch, and does his best to let his moment go and figure out what’s going on now instead. 

 

Dez manages himself well enough as they leave the orphanage, as they all follow Nick and Anaïs towards the wall that wends its way around the settlement. He still feels wrong, as though the world isn’t quite the way it should be, but he accepts it, because nothing is as it should be anymore. 

There’s no reason to bother trying to pretend that anything is okay. 

But he’s okay enough to exist, and he’s okay enough to pull some logic out of his ass, that they need to follow the kids and make sure they’re safe. There are no guards posted at the gate leading out of the city, and if Nick has the scent of one of the little girls that they’re following and that scent leads  _ out _ , they need to go. 

Nick doesn’t seem happy about it, but it isn’t as though Dez is happy, either. 

He doesn’t expect Nick to start knocking on doors, but it happens anyways. That’s fine. Nick can do what he wants. Instead of paying attention to it, Dez focuses on Ode, who --by the time he pays them any attention-- has somehow managed to climb halfway up the wall to where guards should have been posted. 

He’s distracted enough that he doesn’t notice the person who’s come out of the house until he finally turns around, away from where Ode has managed to get up to the post and is rifling through anything they can find up there. When he  _ does  _ turn around, though… Dez stops dead for the second time that morning, and  _ stares _ . 

For a good minute, he’s sure that he never actually left whatever state he’d been in just a little while earlier. Because that person, that… No, he isn’t a person, not anymore, he hadn’t been for a long time… That  _ thing _ , that  _ creature  _ standing there? That was  _ Lan _ . 

But Lan is standing beside Nick, and Nick is  _ here,  _ in the present. Nick isn’t in That Place, Nick didn’t come with him from Before. Nick is something that can tie him to reality. 

Anaïs is standing beside Lan, too. Dez stares from her to Lan and back again, before fixing his gaze firmly on his old companion. 

He stares until Nick comes over, and even then, he hardly looks away to speak when he’s asked a question. 

“I know him,” he says. “From… Before.” 

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Nick asks him, and Dez doesn’t know how to answer. He shakes his head a tiny bit, unwilling to stop himself from just  _ looking  _ at Lan. 

“It’s not a bad thing,” he says faintly, and Nick’s hand is on his shoulder again, and he leans into the touch because even though he is staring at Lan,  _ Nick  _ is there, and that means that he isn’t back Before, and that they --both he  _ and  _ Lan, apparently-- made it out of there alive, and into this strange Wasteland instead.

“Well. That’s… not a bad thing,” Nick says, and he doesn’t sound nearly as unhappy as he had a few minutes prior. Dez takes it for what it’s worth, and when Nick finally leaves him to kick open the gate and lead Anaïs and the rest of them out into the wilderness, he feels just a little bit stronger for it. 

Lan looks at him for a moment as they walk out the gate, but his gaze shows no sign of recognition, and Dez feels a sharp pang of  _ something  _ in his chest that he refuses to identify. He swallows it down to process later, when they don’t have a missing child --missing  _ children _ \-- on their hands, and speeds up just a little to walk beside Ode, instead. 

**Author's Note:**

> Dez and Lan belong to me  
> Nick belongs to @bagobats on tumblr  
> Anaïs belongs to @sarcastic-skeptic on tumblr  
> Ode belongs to @mushygreens on tumblr
> 
> Come scream at me on tumblr @deathishauntedbyhumans  
> Kudos/comments are love


End file.
